Hacking the Price is Right

Terry Kniess is a weatherman with a knack for patterns. After years of watching The Price is Right, he began to notice a few in the way the show works. Terry went on to become the first person in the show’s 38-year history to win both showcases with an exact bet, in this case $23 743.

The Price Is Right. Here was a perfect challenge. It fit the ways their brains worked. They began watching the show in earnest. Before they stepped foot in the Bob Barker Studio, they were going to be prepared; “Good TV is rehearsed TV,” Terry likes to say. For four months during the summer of 2008, they recorded The Price Is Right every morning and watched it together in bed every night, Terry hunting for patterns and Linda doing the math. It didn’t take long for them to find their edge. In The Price Is Right‘s greatest strength, he and Linda also found its greatest weakness: It had survived all those years because it seemed never to change. Even when Drew Carey replaced Bob Barker — the show’s own version of Vatican II — he rocked a similar skinny microphone. Behind all the screaming and seeming chaos, there was a precise and nostalgic order. Terry says he first sat upright in bed when a distinctive grill called the Big Green Egg came up for bid again and again. It was always $1,175.